On the night of April 13, Ethereum developers activated the Shapella update in the main network of the project. Users have the opportunity to withdraw cryptocurrency from staking.
The hard fork took place on epoch #194,048, which was finalized. The developers noted that there are “a couple of missed blocks” in the network, but in general the update was successful, and the blockchain looks stable.
At the time of writing, validators have unlocked more than 3,100 ETH. At the same time, cryptocurrency continues to flow into the deposit contract.
According to the service beaconcha.in , approximately 50 minutes after the implementation of the hard fork, the blockchain processed the withdrawals (full and partial) for 8835 ETH (~$16.96 million at the current exchange rate) — the amount continues to grow.
More than 4,000 validators are waiting for withdrawals, and there are over 3,000 validators in line.
According to Nansen, a full withdrawal of funds is available for 7948 validators with a total of 284,622 ETH (more than $546 million) on their balance sheets. The total amount of assets in the stake exceeds 18 million ETH.
At the same time, the addresses of 56% of validators do not have the prefix 0x01 — this type of data is necessary to unlock assets.
In September 2022, Ethereum activated The Merge update, with which the blockchain switched to the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. Participants of the main network were given access to staking — directly (validators) or through specialized protocols.
Shapella includes changes for Shanghai levels and Capella consensus. The most important of them is the possibility of withdrawing ETH from the Beacon Chain deposit contract.
The developers have also reduced gas costs when performing certain types of transactions, optimized data storage in the blockchain, implemented a number of EVM-related improvements and introduced new cryptographic primitives.
Ethereum quotes reacted to the activation of Shapella with volatility, but no significant price movements were observed. At the time of writing, the cryptocurrency is trading near $1920.
Digital assets from the top 10 by capitalization also did not show a significant reaction to the activation of update. A similar situation is observed among the tokens of the liquid staking segment.
